When I wrote Building a Sustainable Theater: How to Remove Gatekeepers and Take Control of Your Artistic Career, my goal was to encourage theater artists to think of themselves not as employees hired by institutions or corporations, but as owners who had control of their career and the means of production, and who had skin in the game. My goal was to empower theater artists to form theaters anywhere in the country, not just a few major cities. Over the years, I had come to see the whole nonprofit system as a mixed blessing, at best, and the commercial system as artistically bankrupt. My book was meant to serve as a lighthouse, one of many, I hoped, that described alternatives for living a sustainable, rooted, creative life.

Recently, @apoorplayer sent me a news release and website about an exciting development: the creation of a legal business structure called an Artist Corporation which is about to be made law in Colorado. The A-Corp was devised by Yancey Strickler,

“a writer and entrepreneur whose work supports creative people. He’s the cofounder of Kickstarter, The Creative Independent, Metalabel, Artist Corporations, the Dark Forest Collective, and DFOS (the Dark Forest Operating System). He’s the author of the books This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World, The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet, On the Creative Life, The Dark Forest Era, and the cohost of the New Creative Era podcast with Joshua Citarella.”

Clearly, this is someone who has devoted his life to helping artists thrive and “to make cooperation as easy as competition, especially for creative people.” The A-Corp is another important step toward that goal. What is it? Here’s a brief description, and a link to a TED Talk.

The problem that A-Corps address is that creative work doesn’t quite fit into the business structures that exist today:

“Today, when artists want to formalize their creative work — to collaborate, share ownership, protect their intellectual property, or simply get health insurance — they’re forced to use legal structures that were designed for conventional businesses. LLCs, S-Corps, and C-Corps don’t account for the unique realities of creative work — shared intellectual property, artistic mission protections, the way creative collaborations actually function, or the need to keep creative control in the hands of the people making the art. The result? Most artists either operate informally — without protections, without benefits, without building equity — or they spend thousands on lawyers to retrofit business structures that weren’t built for them.

WHAT THE LAW DOES

Artists keep control Artists must own at least 51% of all voting power at all times. This is locked into the statute and cannot be changed by an operating agreement. The people making the art always control the company.

A stated artistic mission Every A-Corp has a stated artistic mission in its founding documents. The company can specify that the mission has primacy over financial objectives, that they’re equal, or define its own balance. The mission has legal weight.

IP stays with artists Artistic work can never be transferred to non-artist investors or third parties. If the company dissolves, all artistic work reverts to the artists who created it. These “reversionary rights” are not available to creditors.

Investors without control Economic rights can be separated from governance rights. Investors can hold rights to distributions, royalties, and revenue participation without getting any voting power or creative control.

A new kind of share The A-Corp creates a new type of ownership unit — the A-Corp Share. Unlike traditional equity, A-Corp Shares can separate economic rights from creative control, be issued to artists in exchange for their creative contributions (not just cash), and be structured as fractional units that let collaborators share in the upside of work they helped create. An artist’s creative work is recognized as a capital contribution with real value, not just sweat equity. This makes it possible for a band, a film crew, or a game studio to build shared ownership that reflects who actually made the work.

Easy to form By July 2027, Colorado will provide long-form articles with check-box and fill-in-the-blank provisions covering ownership, governance, IP terms, tax treatment, and more. No expensive lawyers required for standard setups.

And the cool thing is you don’t have to live in Colorado to take advantage of this. No matter where you live, you can incorporate in Colorado. Think of banks like, say, PNC Bank, Bank of America, or Chase – each of these is incorporated in Delaware, but their headquarters are elsewhere. While it would be great to have A-Corps made law in all 50 states, artists don’t have to wait for the political process to move forward. Just incorporate in Colorado. In fact, you can pledge your intention to form an A-Corp

Are you curious about how an A-Corp might benefit your creative work? There is a “Model Your A-Corp” calculator where you can “see what an Artist Corporation could look like for your creative practice.” Give it a try!

I am strongly considering doing a new edition of Building a Sustainable Theater to include this information, because the model I described there could easily be adapted to the new A-Corp structure, and benefit from some of the elements contained in it.

Information about this breakthrough needs to be distributed throughout the US. Musicians, painters, dancers, theater artists, filmmakers, writers – anyone who does creative work – would benefit from exploring this new idea. Thank you, Yancey Strickler, for all that you have done and are doing for creative artists.

My wife, who finds herself a bit irritated with Paul Kingsnorth’s vision, offers as an alternative this video of Emma Thompson reading the final paragraph of Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade.

Whatever you might think about this vision (I quite like it myself, especially as read by Ms. Thompson), it has the two parts of prophetic speech that Walter Brueggemann describes in The Prophetic Imagination: 1) critique (in italics), 2) vision (in bold).

Transcript: For above all, this gylanic world will be a world where the minds of children—both girls and boys—will no longer be fettered. It will be a world where limitation and fear will no longer be systematically taught us through myths about how inevitably evil and perverse we humans are. In this world, children will not be taught epics about men who are honored for being violent or fairy tales about children who are lost in frightful woods where women are malevolent witches. They will be taught new myths, epics, and stories in which human beings are good; men are peaceful; and the power of creativity and love—symbolized by the sacred Chalice, the holy vessel of life—is the governing principle. For in this gylanic world, our drive for justice, equality, and freedom, our thirst for knowledge and spiritual illumination, and our yearning for love and beauty will at last be freed. And after the bloody detour of androcratic history, both women and men will at last find out what being human can mean.

My review of Paul Kingsnorth’s magnum opus Against the Grain raised a question: what responsibilities do writers or artists have to provide a vision? You may remember that I had complained that Kingsnorth provides a vivid condemnation of our current culture, but he doesn’t provide a compelling vision for those who might agree with his diagnosis. Should an artist be obligated to provide a solution to the problems they raised?Strangely, my answer to the first question – “is it the responsibility of writers or artists to provide a “vision” – is “Yes,” while my answer to the second question – “should an artist be obligated to provide a solution to the problems they raise” – is “No.” I suppose that seems weird – aren’t they the same question? Not at all. The difference lies in the words I have formatted in bold. There’s a difference between a responsibility and an obligation, as there is between a vision and a solution. A “vision” is a work of the imagination that describes an image of what might be, which may or may not include instructions about how to attain it; a “solution,” on the other hand, is an answer to a specific problem, and can be thought of as possessing the underlying form of a syllogism: if we do X, then Y will be changed. In other words, a vision is a description of a possible way of being: here’s what it might look or feel like to live a certain way. That description may be simply a portrayal of a way of treating each other. I think of the novels of Wendell Berry as examples of a vision of how we might live together.Similarly, there is a difference between a “responsibility” and an “obligation.” A responsibility is something that is part of a role you have accepted – e.g., as a nurse, it is your responsibility to take care of the needs of your patient. An obligation comes with a specific task and is compelled from without – e.g., as a parolee, you are obligated to report to your parole officer once a week. To fail in a responsibility is to feel guilt; to fail in an obligation is to be punished. I think artists have a responsibility to, implicitly, allegorically, metaphorically show us a vision. Kingsnorth, at least at one time shared this belief. In “The Dark Mountain Manifesto,” (2009), Kingsnorth and his co-author Dougald Hines wrote:> “We believe that artists – which is to us the most welcoming of words, taking under its wing writers of all kinds, painters, musicians, sculptors, poets, designers, creators, makers of things, dreamers of dreams – have a responsibility to begin the process of decoupling [from civilization]. We believe that, in the age of ecocide, the last taboo must be broken – and that only artists can do it… We believe that art must look over the edge, face the world that is coming with a steady eye, and rise to the challenge of ecocide with a challenge of its own: an artistic response to the crumbling of the empires of the mind.” I sought to hold Kingsnorth accountable for having himself forgotten that responsibility.Nevertheless, while a vision might be weak or lacking in Against the Machine, perhaps it could be argued that he provides a vision of “the process of decoupling” from civilization in his novels. Kingsnorth has written three, which are held in high regard: The Wake (2015); Beast (2017); and Alexandria (2020). I confess to having not read these novels, but I found their descriptions gave me a sense of Kingsnorth’s expressed vision.> The Wake is described as “a postapocalyptic novel set a thousand years in the past” in which Kingsnorth brings the “dire scenario” of the Norman Invasion of 1066 “back to us through the eyes of the unforgettable Buccmaster, a proud landowner bearing witness to the end of his world. Accompanied by a band of like-minded men, Buccmaster is determined to seek revenge on the invaders. But as the men travel across the scorched English landscape, Buccmaster becomes increasingly unhinged by the immensity of his loss, and their path forward becomes increasingly unclear."> Beast, part 2 in the trilogy, “plunges you into the world of Edward Buckmaster, a man alone on an empty moor in the west of England. What he has left behind we don’t yet know. What he faces is an existential battle with himself, the elements, and something he begins to see in the margins of his vision: some creature that is tracking him, the pursuit of which will become an obsession. This short, shocking, and exhilarating novel is a vivid exploration of isolation, courage, and the search for truth that continues the story set one thousand years earlier in Paul Kingsnorth’s bravura debut novel, The Wake."> Finally, part 3, Alexandria: “One thousand years from now, a small religious community lives in what were once the fens of eastern England. They are perhaps the world’s last human survivors. Now they find themselves stalked by a force that draws ever closer, and that seems to have brought them to the brink of extinction. A force that offers them a promise and a threat: a place called Alexandria. Set in a time on the far side of an apocalypse, and perhaps on the verge of another, Paul Kingsnorth’s radical new novel is a work of matchless, mythic imagination. It is driven by elemental themes: community versus the self, the mind versus the body, machine over man—and the tension between an unstable present and an unknown, unknowable future.“What I gather from those short summaries of Kingsnorth’s vision is that, first, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a thousand years in the past, the present, or a thousand years in the future, it’s all post-apocalyptic all the time. It might be the personal apocalypse of war and invasion, the worldwide apocalypse of ecocide, or the threat of the end of humanity in a transhumanist future, but regardless it’s all bad. As he said in the Dark Mountain manifesto, artists should “rise to the challenge of ecocide with a challenge of its own: an artistic response to the crumbling of the empires of the mind.” His personal response is a vision of a world that is dire, violent, and dangerous, one in which human beings are isolated and alone. The enemy is “community,” “the mind,” and “the machine,” and the hero is “the self,” “the body,” and “man.” My impression is of a cross between the Mad Max movies and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road with a little of The Matrix thrown into the threat of transhumanism. And I suppose if that’s your vision and you’ve spelled it out over the course of almost 1,000 pages, then there’s not much point in repeating it in Against the Machine. Of course, that assumes that everybody who read Against the Machine is well-acquainted with Kingsnorth’s oeuvre, which may not be the case. Nevertheless, it’s not like it takes a lot to figure out that, in the mind of Paul Kingsnorth, we’re all fucked and there’s nothing to be done about it except learn to survive within the inevitable violent chaos that ensues. So perhaps my complaint is unjustified, and Kingsnorth does have a vision, it’s just an implied one that relies on simple subtraction to figure out: today minus modernity equals…well, in the end it still equals violence and ecocide, as The Wake shows, so I’m not certain what should motivate me to change my lifestyle by retreating to a small tract of land to subsistence farm without electricity or farm equipment. Maybe it’s the joys of a fireplace. I don’t mean to be flip or dismissive, but ultimately I just don’t understand what would prompt someone to write an almost-400 page book (not to mention three lengthy novels) that basically says, echoing John Maynard Keynes' oft-misunderstood point, “in the long run we are all dead.” Is the purpose to persuade his readers to simply give up hope and live in fear and loathing? In the privacy of my mind, I have come to refer to such extreme pessimism as “Gollum Philosophy,” except in this case Kingsnorth clutches not a cursed ring, but rather, like Stephen Crane’s naked desert dweller, his own bitter heart, which he loves “because it is bitter / And because it is my heart.“As Hamlet might have said had he shared Kingsnorth’s worldview, “the rest is violence."

In the desert

I saw a creature, naked, bestial,

Who, squatting upon the ground,

Held his heart in his hands,

And ate of it.

I said, “Is it good, friend?”

“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;

“But I like it “Because it is bitter, “And because it is my heart.”

Stephen Crane, In the Desert

A few days ago, I finished reading Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine, a compelling and powerfully written rejection of, basically, everything introduced into our culture since the advent of the Industrial Revolution.

There is a prophetic streak in Kingsnorth that gives his writing a propulsive energy that is simultaneously bracing and abrasive that seems to have been present since at least his 2009 “Dark Mountain Manifesto,” co-written with Dougald Hine. “There is a fall coming,” they wrote.

“We live in an age in which familiar restraints are being kicked away, and foundations snatched from under us. After a quarter century of complacency, in which we were invited to believe in bubbles that would never burst, prices that would never fall, the end of history, the crude repackaging of the triumphalism of Conrad’s Victorian twilight – Hubris has been introduced to Nemesis. Now a familiar human story is being played out. It is the story of an empire corroding from within. It is the story of a people who believed, for a long time, that their actions did not have consequences. It is the story of how that people will cope with the crumbling of their own myth. It is our story.

Seventeen years later, their observations are, if anything, truer than ever, and as I read Against the Machine, I inwardly applauded Kingsnorth’s ability to condemn modern life with vigor and memorable imagery. It is a style of writing that I have encountered in another writer whose insights I admire, Chris Hedges, whose pit-of-hell despair I mostly find exhausting and debilitating. Which, in turn, leads me to question myself. Am I just an intellectual coward unwilling to look reality square in the face? Or is there something else preventing me from shouting “amen” after Kingsnorth swings his rhetorical sledgehammer at 21st-century society?

As someone who used as an epigraph on his blog Buckminster Fuller’s famous quotation, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete,” I admire that Kingsnorth walks his talk. He rejects much of modern technology, and consequently has withdrawn to a small homestead in rural Ireland where he does his best to live according to his anti-technological values. And yet, he doesn’t seem to be able to describe the joys and challenges of his chosen life in a way that might inspire others to follow his example. He seems much more comfortable railing “against the machine” than singing “for the earth.”

In her brilliant essay on Homer’s Iliad, the 20th-century French philosopher Simone Weil, to whom Kingsnorth alludes to admiringly more than once in Against the Machine, wrote about the concept of “force” that she finds at the center of the epic’s conflict. Weil defines force as “that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him.” She goes on, “Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man’s flesh shrinks away. In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to.” This could easily serve as a summary of Kingsnorth’s book. His focus is almost completely oppositional.

An oppositional focus tends to see society as being aggressive, as forcing things upon us. You can see this in the words he regularly uses to describe modern civilization. Our culture is “under attack” from the “Black Ships of the globalized economy,” and our very humanity is threatened by the advance of The Machine (always capitalized). we are “entirely enslaved,” both by the left and by global capitalism, which are"engines for destroying" customary ways of living." They even want to take away our fireplaces, which is the “latest blow against the home as the centre of the universe.” If you lose your fireplace, “you literally lose your focus as a culture.” Indeed, “Strip the last remaining fires from the last remaining hearths, and you are one step closer to what is perhaps the ultimate ambition of the Machine: the abolition of home…The home must go, so that the Machine might live.” Further: “any blow struck for the survival or the revival of the home and the family is an act of resistance and of rebuilding…The home can be a friction against the Machine. If this is a war, it is long past time to begin fighting back.” Electricity is an enemy. “D. H. Lawrence once said that the world changed forever when the first electric bulb was switched on. Today those bulbs obscure the very stars, and we cannot take our eyes off the screens.” Indeed, “the sacred and the digital not only don’t mix, but are fatal to each other.” Referencing his previous activisim in the movement against climate change, he says “Older, crustier greenies like me, labouring under the yoke of a pre-modern sensibility which makes us reluctant to eat the [vat-grown] sludge [for breakfast] and live in the pod…” Finally, “What Progress wants,” he asserts, “is the end of transcendance.”

I could keep this up for much longer, but you get the picture: Kingsnorth’s vision is eschatological.

To engage in prophetic imagination, which seems to be Kingsnorth’s intention, usually does involve a vivid description of the end times, or at least the end of a regime. However, according to Walter Brueggemann’s Prophetic Imagination, probably one of the most influential books on the subject, there are two aspects of prophetic speech that both must be present. The first we might call the “descendant function,” which describes things that exist but ought not to. Kingsnorth has this one down cold. It’s the “ascendent function,” the description of things that do not exist but should, where Kingsnorth is weak. He has no strong vision for a possible future.

At best, his vision can best be described as being “free” of all the negative things he’d previously described in gruesome detail: free of cell phones, free of electricity, free of the global economy, free of the internet (although he admit that he must interact with that in order to get his work distributed, which is totally understandable), free of trans people (yeah, that chapter I find deeply offensive), in other words, well, free of The Machine. But that’s a subtraction story, not a vision.

The result of Kingsnorth’s book, even if one agrees (as I do) with many of his observations, is to leave one paralyzed in a defensive crouch and shaking one’s fist at the heavens in bitter despair with no vision of how one is to live other than Not That, which he renames “radical reaction.” And I think that is a refusal of prophetic responsibility. At the very least, he should help us grieve.

Says Brueggemann, “I believe that the proper idiom for the prophet in cutting through the royal numbness and denial is the language of grief, the rhetoric that engages the community in mourning for a funeral they do not want to admit. It is indeed their own funeral. I have been increasingly impressed with the capacity of the prophet to use the language of lament and the symbolic creation of a death scene as a way of bringing to reality what the king must see and will not. And I believe that grief and mourning, that crying in pathos, is the ultimate form of criticism, for it announces the sure end of the whole royal arrangement.” Kingsnorth’s bitterness prevents lamentation, both his or ours.

In the face of despair, Brueggemann suggests three tasks for the prophet to undertake:

• to offer of symbols “that are adequate to contradict a situation of hopelessness in which newness is unthinkable”

• “to bring to public expression those very hopes and yearnings that have been denied so long and suppressed so deeply that we no longer know they are there

• to speak metaphorically about hope but concretely about “the real newness that comes to us and redefines our situation”

He does this through what Brueggemann calls the “language of amazement” which, is the language of hope, and is based on “the refusal to accept the reading of reality which is the majority opinion.”

The language of hope and amazement is lyrical, metaphoric, not “explanatory and scientifically argumentative;” it must touch “the hopeless person at many different points.” And herein lies the tragedy of Paul Kingsnorth, I think.

Fewer than twenty years ago, “The Dark Mountain Manifesto” was filled with the language of amazement and hope, of lyricism and metaphor. There are long segments drawn from the poetry of Robinson Jeffers, quotes from Emerson, Joseph Conrad, Bertrand Russell, Philip Larkin, John Berger, to name just a few. “Our world is still shaped by stories,” they declare, rightly I believe, and while we “find ourselves, our ways of telling unbalanced, trapped inside a runaway narrative, headed for the worst kind of encounter with reality,” there is an alternative:

“In such a moment, writers, artists, poets and storytellers of all kinds have a critical role to play. Creativity remains the most uncontrollable of human forces: without it, the project of civilisation is inconceivable, yet no part of life remains so untamed and undomesticated. Words and images can change minds, hearts, even the course of history. Their makers shape the stories people carry through their lives, unearth old ones and breathe them back to life, add new twists, point to unexpected endings. It is time to pick up the threads and make the stories new, as they must always be made new, starting from where we are.

“Mainstream art in the West has long been about shock; about busting taboos, about Getting Noticed. This has gone on for so long that it has become common to assert that in these ironic, exhausted, post-everything times, there are no taboos left to bust. But there is one.

“The last taboo is the myth of civilisation.”

They go on, in words that sound like a call to action:

“We believe that artists – which is to us the most welcoming of words, taking under its wing writers of all kinds, painters, musicians, sculptors, poets, designers, creators, makers of things, dreamers of dreams – have a responsibility to begin the process of decoupling. We believe that, in the age of ecocide, the last taboo must be broken – and that only artists can do it…We believe that art must look over the edge, face the world that is coming with a steady eye, and rise to the challenge of ecocide with a challenge of its own: an artistic response to the crumbling of the empires of the mind.”

Now, seventeen years later, there are only furtive gestures in this direction to be found in Against the Machine. Instead of artists, Kingsnorth is now pointing toward philosophers, theologists, and cultural critics such as Paul the Apostle, G.K. Chesterton, René Guénon, Lewis Mumford, and Jacques Ellul. Oh, as always in books of this nature, Christopher Lasch. New Yorker writer Cal Revely-Calder fittingly and depressingly entitled his review of Kingsnorth’s book “A Dark Ecologist Warns Against Hope,” summarizing it as follows: “For years, Paul Kingsnorth was one of the most visible members of the green movement. Then he walked away from it. Now he wants us to walk away from everything else.” Wow.

Which leads me to echo, sadly and perhaps superficially, the minister of the iconic movie The Big Chill: where did Paul’s hope go? Perhaps the answer to my question is scattered throughout his books, essays, and novels written between 2009 and now, I don’t know. But if Against the Machine is Kingsnorth’s magnum opus, I’d say that, without hope, without a vision of the future that goes beyond “Run away!,” he runs the risk of being seen as an old man yelling at clouds.

I haven’t been posting much lately, as I’ve been traveling and am now in Chicago helping my stepson.

A few brief thoughts. I’m reading Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine in conjunction with Hartmut Rosa’s The Uncontrollability of the World" – many interesting echoes between the two books, and there are many others that probably should be added to the stew. [1] I’ve been a bit reluctant until now to wade into Against the Machine, as I found Kingsnorth’s Dark Mountain Project 2009 manifesto so extremely bleak that I’ve kept my distance. Obviously, Kingsnorth has been through many changes in his ideas over the course of almost two decades, but there is still a sort of sub-terranean rumble of despair that I find disturbing. Nevertheless, Kingsnorth references many of the writers that have been foundational for me – Schumacher, for instance – so I suspect his writing will be worthwhile.

While I have lived in cities many times – New York City twice, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Asheville – my preference is for small towns, so many of Kingsnorth’s touchstones resonate. I don’t know whether either Kingsnorth of Rosa have any connection with anarchism – I think Kingsnorth mentions David Graeber (I’m nowhere near completing Against the Machine yet) – but I have anarchistic, localistic, human scale tendencies. Anarchism makes us think that maybe the way things are set up might not be as “natural” as they are made out to be, and that, as David Graeber put it, “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently,” which threatens to upset the applecart of our daily life.

I think Rosa’s concept of resonance provides a possible prescription in relation to Kingsnorth’s diagnosis of what ails us as a society, and so I intend to work my way backward from The Uncontrollability of the World to Resonance and finally Social Acceleration. Much of Rosa’s and Kingsnorth’s ideas seem to dovetail with many of the anti-technology, anti-social-media tendencies that I share with many people here on MB and elsewhere. Kingsnorth and Rosa both seem to give great importance to the power of story, which, as a theater historian and theorist, I am finding inspirational and stimulating.

David Graeber, in Fragments of an Anarchistic Anthropology, writes that anarchism is “a project, which sets out to begin creating the institutions of a new society ‘within the shell of the old,’ to expose, subvert, and undermine structures of domination but always, while doing so, proceeding in a democratic fashion, a manner which itself demonstrates those structures are unnecessary.” Or, as Buckminster Fuller famously said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” My books Building a Sustainabe Theater and DIY Theater MFA are my attempts to describe what this might look like for theater.

[1] - For instance:

• Thinking in Systems by Donella H Meadows
• The Need for Roots by Simone Weil
• *Art and Technics (*and maybe The Myth of the Machine or his books about the City) by Lewis Mumford
• The Republic of Love by Martha Nussbaum
• Anything by David Graeber

Several days ago, Alan Jacobs (@ayjay@hcommons.social) published the following in a post entitled “Reorientation":

In times of social and political crisis, especially when new and often contradictory bulletins are arriving on our ICDs (Internet-Connected Devices) at a second-by-second rate, you and I need to step back. We need the relief. But at the same time, it is impossible, for me anyway, not to think about what’s happening. Just saying “I’m not going to read any more about this” is an inadequate response; it has a tendency to leave me fretful and at loose ends.

What helps is to read works from the past that deal with questions and challenges that are structurally similar to the ones we’re facing but that emerged in a wholly different context.

The idea of choosing works that are structurally similar to what’s going on, is an approach that uses literature, not as an escape, but rather as a means of achieving emotional distance for contemplation. I was reminded of how vaccines work by injecting a small amount of the disease into the body in order to allow the autoimmune system to strengthen itself. The works Dr. Jacobs has chosen for this moment includes Psalms, Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison, and Machiavelli’s Discourses.

I’ve been trying to figure how I, as a theater historian with a background in dramatic literature, might follow Dr. Jacobs' lead. One work that sprang to mind immediately is Alfred Jarry’s bizarre and outrageous surrealist play, Ubu Roi (1896), whose central character, King Ubu, “is an antihero – fat, ugly, vulgar, gluttonous, grandiose, dishonest, stupid, jejune, voracious, greedy, cruel, cowardly and evil.” Another possibility: Sophocles' Antigone, which seems fitting as a portrait of a tyrannical ruler whose reaction to resistance is brutality (although Jean Anouilh’s version, written during the Nazi occupation of Paris, might supplement the original Greek version). And finally, Friedrich Schiller’s 1804 drama, William Tell, about an individual’s resistance in the face of inhumanity, and the moral questions that arise from his resistance.

Jacobs concludes:

This practice of breaking bread with the dead in times of crisis offers a threefold reorientation: - Emotional, because it gives you a break from people who are continually trying to stoke your feelings of anger and hatred; - Intellectual, because in comparing past situations with ours you get an increasingly clear sense of what about our current situation is familiar (and therefore subject to familiar remedies) and what unusual or even unique (and therefore in need of new strategies); - Moral, because, as Aragorn says to Éomer, “Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man’s part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.”

Well said, Dr. Jacobs, and many thanks for providing me with inspiration to think differently about my reading. I think it might be wise to add to my list a re-reading of *Breaking Bread with the Dead” as well.